He walked forward slowly, reenacting as best he could the movements of Steele as he remembered them from the RAM-TV videos.
He walked looking to his left—out over the flat, neatly mowed field where the crowd had gathered for the demonstration, their backs to the sidewalk. At the opposite end of the open expanse there was a raised platform, no doubt the one that had been used by the BDA speakers. At the edge of the field loomed the contested statue of Colonel Willard.
He walked on, stopping intermittently, as Steele had, as if to pay closer attention to some part of the crowd. The first four trees he passed as he proceeded along the field’s edge were tall but relatively narrow-trunked. The fifth was the massive pine in which the steel-jacketed bullet had lodged itself after passing through the lower part of Steele’s skull, brain, and facial bone.
Three more times he walked back and forth, retracing Steele’s path to his death, and picturing as he did so the red laser dot of the sniper’s scope that had followed the man every step of the way. Gurney found the mental re-creation of this so vivid he had for a moment the disturbing illusion of feeling that dot on the back of his own head. At the end of his third passage, he stopped at the big pine and aligned himself with Steele’s position at the moment of impact. In his peripheral vision he was aware of the bloodstain where the man had fallen, his life abruptly over. John Steele. Husband of Kim Steele. Someone’s son. Someone’s friend. Someone’s partner. Reduced in one dreadful moment to memories in the minds of some, to pain in the hearts of others, to a brown stain on a concrete sidewalk.
Gurney was seized by a sudden, powerful sense of grief that took him by surprise. His chest and throat felt constricted. His eyes filled with tears.
He wasn’t aware of the cop coming up behind him until he heard a familiar, unpleasant voice. “Okay, buddy, you had a perfectly clear warning this morning about crossing—”
The cop stopped in midsentence when Gurney turned and faced him.
For a few seconds no one said anything.
Gurney wiped his eyes roughly with the back of his hand. “Beckert knows I’m here.”
The cop blinked and stared at him, something about the situation finally dawning on him. “Did you . . . uh . . . know Officer Steele?”
“Yes,” said Gurney. He didn’t feel that the answer was entirely untrue.
Back in the headquarters conference room, Torres and Kline were already in their seats, both checking their phones. The sheriff’s seat was empty. The mayor, however, was in his usual seat at the end of the table, engrossed in eating a piece of apple pie out of a Styrofoam box. His rust-colored comb-over was in slight disarray.
Gurney sat next to Kline. “Have we lost the sheriff?”
“He’s at the jail. Evidently one of the BDA detainees wants to trade information on our so-called third man for a get-out-of-jail-free card. Goodson likes to handle those interviews personally.” It was clear from Kline’s tone it was an appetite he didn’t share.
Gurney turned to the mayor. “I heard you were tied up at a Rotary lunch.”
Shucker swallowed, wiping crumbs from the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. “Roto-Rooter lunch would’ve been a better name for it.” His tone suggested he considered this comment clever and expected a request to elaborate.
Gurney said nothing.
“Sounds unpleasant,” said Kline.
The door opened and Beckert entered. He sat down, opened the laptop, and checked the time.
“It’s one fifty,” he announced. “Time to reconvene. Our current status is that Judd and his team are continuing their search of the Gorts’ compound. They’ve already found computer evidence that links them to the Knights of the Rising Sun, as well as some physical evidence that may tie them directly to Jordan and Tooker.”
Kline sat up a little straighter. “What’s the physical evidence?”
“We’ll get to that. I want you to see some photos first. They’ll give you some insight into the pair of lunatics we’re dealing with.” He tapped a key on his laptop, and the first photo appeared on the monitor.
It showed a dirt road hemmed in by tangled evergreens, leading to a gate in a high chain-link fence. Affixed to the fence were two square signs. The one to the left of the gate bore two lines of hand-printed words, too far from the camera to be legible. The one to the right, in addition to three lines of printing, had affixed to it what looked like an actual human skull.
The next photo Beckert showed was a close-up of the sign on the left.
THE LAWS OF MAN ARE TOOLS OF SATAN
THE GOVERNMENTS OF MAN ARE DENS OF SERPENTS
The next photo was a close-up of the sign with the skull. Gurney could now see that the skull was attached to the sign with a short arrow whose shaft and feathers protruded from the left eye socket. He recognized it as a crossbow bolt, a more powerful and deadly projectile than a normal arrow. The words printed below it were no more inviting.
CHURCH PROPERTY
ACCESS RESTRICTED
TRESPASSERS BEWARE
Shucker was half watching the screen as he pressed the back of his plastic fork into the corners of his pie container to extract the last few crumbs. “You see that skull, makes you wonder whose it is. And how it ended up there, out in the middle of nowhere. You know what I mean?”
No one responded.
Beckert let a few seconds pass before going on to the next shot. “This is a photo of a photo that Judd found in the tray of a computer printer in the Gorts’ cabin.”
Shucker blinked in confusion. “Say that again?”
Beckert repeated his statement with a slowness someone else might have found insulting, but Shucker just nodded. “Photo of a photo. Got it.”
What appeared on the screen was a picture of three strange figures in a room with log walls and a stone fireplace. Two of the figures were gaunt, bearded men in camo hunting clothes. One was much taller than the other—so much so that Gurney concluded that one must be a giant or the other a midget to account for such a difference. Between them stood a large black bear—although “stood” would not be the most accurate word, since the animal’s body was being held in an upright position by a rope. One end was fashioned into a sort of noose around the bear’s thick neck, and the other end was fastened to a low roof beam. On the mantel above the fireplace were several crossbows fitted with hunting scopes. In a jagged arc above them on the wall were dozens of broadhead hunting bolts.
“The Gorts with their latest trophy,” said Beckert.
“The Gorts?” said Gurney. “I thought you said they were twins.”
“They are. Ezechias is six foot two, and Ezechiel is four foot ten. Apart from that, they’re identical. Same face, same voice, same lunacy.”
“There’s no spring bear-hunting season, is there?” said Kline.
“Absolutely not.”
“So they just do as they please—hunt whenever they feel like it, in or out of season?”
“I’m sure they prefer to do it out of season. One more way to tell the law to go to hell.”
“They fish with dynamite,” said Shucker, pressing his little white fork into another corner of his pie box.
Gurney stared at him. “Dynamite?”
“When the Handsome Brothers stone quarry got shut down after the big explosion, the state auditors discovered someone had made off with a gross of dynamite sticks. Back then, the twins worked there. But every fall folks in the area claim there’s a loud thump up to Clapp Hollow Lake and then the Gort boys spend the next week or two salting fish for the winter. Course it’s hard to know what’s fact or fiction out there in the hollows.”